Terror, Fetish, Fantasy, and Reification

Violence and Meaning in the Namibian Independence Movement

This is it!

Banner Headline

This newspaper, which has also been instrumental in the fight
for a free and independent Namibia, wishes to extend
congratulations to all our countrymen and women - especially
those who sacrificed in the fight for the right to control their
own destiny - on this, the greatest day in our history. May all
your expectations be fulfilled.

The Namibian, Special Independence edition: March 20-22, 1990

Namibian independence came about in 1990 after a quarter-century
of civil war and international concern. In the eyes of western
governments, independence was the end product of years of
multilateral negotiations among the U.S., South Africa, Angola,
Cuba, and the Soviet Union. The Namibian independence movement,
though, which had fought a protracted civil war and an
international political campaign for independence, saw the
independence process somewhat differently. For them, it was the
South West Africa People's Organization (SWAPO) and the
independence coalition surrounding it that forced Namibian
independence onto the agenda of Africa and the international
community.

It is difficult to contradict the latter interpretation fully;
SWAPO and its predecessors managed to keep Namibia on the
international agenda when such a small and seemingly
insignificant country could reasonably be expected to disappear.
The independence coalition and international solidarity with it
made the territory much more costly for South Africa to maintain
than it would otherwise have been, thus making it more
reasonable for South Africa to give up.

The Namibian, an independent populist newspaper, was both a
crucial member of the independence coalition and a symbol of the
overall diversity of that coalition. Founded in 1985 as a
self-proclaimed "independent" newspaper, The Namibian sought at
once to report the news as an objective media outlet and to
support Namibian independence through the passage of United
Nations Resolution 435. The paper explicitly refused to support
SWAPO, choosing to remain fiercely independent and critical of
all participants in the electoral process: "We did what we
believed in, and it happened to coincide with SWAPO" (Lister,
Interview 478-9).2

This paper is concerned mainly with The Namibian's coverage of
national affairs during the period from 1985-88. The coverage
focused on two key story types: detailed accounts of acts of
terrorism by the occupying forces, mainly in the north; and
statements, interviews, and other coverage of SWAPO and its
allies both inside Namibia and abroad. The Namibian's conduct
during that period played two different, perhaps even
contradictory, roles, each integrally related to the other. The
first, positive role was to peel off the veil of mystery that
surrounds terror; the paper reported the minute details of
scores of incidents, exposing their perpetrators and effectively
rendering acts intended to instill terror little more than
incidents of routine, if nevertheless vicious, violence. The
second role was to characterize "independence" as the
not-terror, the negation of terror. Namibians were encouraged to
reify independence, imagining United Nations Resolution 435 as
the keystone of a Namibian fantasy, free of the troubles
articulated daily in the pages of the "Paper for the People."3

Terror and violence seemed remote to most residents of white
Windhoek, who "never seemed to leave the sanctuary of their
mansions ringed with barbed wire unless it was in the
air-conditioned comfort of their expensive cars" (Lush, Last
Steps 14). In that context, the constant revelations of
atrocities -- while not intended "to push propaganda SWAPO's
way, although that happened automatically" (Lister, Interview
474-6) -- constituted a constant reminder to Windhoek-based
leaders and international observers that the violence of the
occupation was real. "We felt it was also important," said
Lister (Language 59), "to try and reach the people of the south
of the country, many of whom were unaware of what was happening
in the besieged north...." At the same time, as we will see
below, the paper's anchoring of otherwise faceless violence to
specific agents helped remove the veil of mystery that otherwise
would have surrounded the attacks.

The Namibian, like other papers in the southern African liberal
tradition, found itself in an odd position. Its stated and
practiced commitment was to objective, factual reporting of the
news. But it quickly became clear to the paper's staff that
truth itself was politicized in occupied Namibia. Merely
reporting on a SWAPO rally, as Lister has pointed out, was cause
for labeling a journalist 'leftist,' and the paper's commitment
to reporting news that would otherwise be left unrevealed earns
it, to this day, the disparaging label "SWAPO daily" in other
Windhoek papers.4

In such a situation, where revealing the truth becomes, in the
eyes of journalists and others, a political act in itself, the
reverse also happens. Politics becomes a matter, not of
interests and conflict, but of truth against fiction.
Increasingly, in the eyes of The Namibian's staff, the
occupation was not just immoral but literally incorrect. South
Africa's forces violated not just justice and peace but truth
itself. As truth became political under the occupation,
politics became the territory of fact.

That truth, as it was recorded by The Namibian, consisted of two
important elements: state terrorism and the independence
movement. The pages of the newspaper from this period are full
of reports of incidents of violence in the north, and there are
frequent statements from the movement and coverage of its
progress and activities. What coverage lacked, by and large,
was an explicit connection between these two story genres.
Readers were exposed to the terror of occupation and to a
movement that, at least by implication, offered an end to the
terror.5 They were generally left to their own
devices to
define the content of the movement's claims. One thing seemed
clear: a victory for the movement would mean and end to the
terror; as many interviewees pointed out, the particulars of
post-independence policy seemed insignificant in that light.

State Terrorism and Violence

As the journalist Christopher Hitchens has suggested, there is
no clear definition of terrorism (67-9); indeed, in common
political usage the term terrorism often simply refers to
'political violence by a group with whom the speaker disagrees.'
I intend to use a provisional definition of terror, gleaned from
others' work and definitions, and use it to illuminate the
phenomenon I want to discuss here. It is likely that all the
actors listed above, as well as others in the area, have engaged
in activity that could reasonably be considered "terrorism"
according to some adequate definition; it is therefore not my
intention to produce a standard definition of terror against
which movements and actions outside this context could be
measured.

Terror and terrorism, in the context of international
discussion, are generally agreed to contain an element of
physical violence; they are also, simultaneously, generally
expected to be more than just violence, to have some other
property that sets them apart from the violence states and civil
wars might be expected to produce. Webster's dictionary defines
terrorism as violence intended "to demoralize, intimidate, and
subjugate..." (1469). We start to see, then, that the missing
element of terror involves the process of assigning meaning to
violence; in order to be sufficiently terrifying, terror must
remove violence sufficiently from the realm of the routine to
make it mysterious and therefore frightening.6
To that end, the
perpetrators of terror must remain nameless and faceless; with a
concrete origin terrorism becomes mere violence, much of its
purpose lost.

My provisional definition of terrorism centers around its use of
violence to produce terror beyond normal fear of violence. As
Lawrence Freedman suggests, terrorism uses violence to evoke
"terror... [which] may be defined as extreme anxiety infused
with an awesome sense of the uncanny" (399). Terrorism as I use
the term here raises violence to the level of the sacred,
relying on its unpredictability and its mysterious shroud to
produce a generalized sense of fear, even among those who have
not been personally subjected to that violence. Terrorism must
use violence as a substitute -- a place-holder -- for the
political legitimacy its perpetrators are unable or unwilling to
procure. This is, of course, Freud's definition of the fetish:
an idea or object that replaces true desire, diverting attention
from reality.7 Terrorism, then, can be considered
violence as
fetish: pure, undifferentiated violence, its origins masked and
unknown, its purpose the production of fear to replace the lost
legitimacy of a compromised state.

Violence is not necessary, however, to produce terror. The
simple possibility of the unknown is also terrifying,8
and it is
this terrifying unknown that The Namibian (re)produced by
concentrating on reporting terror of the first, more emergent,
kind. Like any good antithesis, the implied resolution to the
problem of South African terrorism -- independence, the
not-terror -- contained elements of its opposite, terror.
Independence was the great unknown; each member of the movement
believed independence would mean something, but most were
unclear on what it would mean. That unknown was terrifying; as
I will argue below, the response was to construct a fantasy of
independence, an elaborate yet vague set of ideas about justice,
peace, nationhood, and so on, all centering on formal
independence. This fantasy served to mask the indeterminacy of
independence, hiding its terrifying quality.

Combining Hegel with Weber, Michael Taussig suggests that the
State gets its power and authority from a mixture of Reason
(Hegel) and violence (Weber). Embodying both at once, the state
generally manages to avoid actually using the violence it
commands (Weber, Politics 79-81; Taussig, State Fetishism
115-16). But what would happen if the legitimacy of that
violence were partially removed? The legitimacy of state
authority, for Weber, rests on the state's being the only
legitimate controller of violence. Once the use of that
violence becomes necessary -- for example, when the state is
losing its legitimacy -- the state's hold on the right to
violence paradoxically becomes less secure. Producing such a
possibility was The Namibian's central achievement as a member
of the independence coalition.

Language and Violence: Demystifying Terror

In an atmosphere in which violence became terror, and terror
became the principal means of controlling a population
increasingly at odds with the colonial government, the role of a
'people's newspaper' seemed clear. Terror, as practiced in
Namibia, required silence; as Taussig has written on Latin
America:

Above all the Dirty War is a war of silencing. There is no
officially declared war. No prisoners. No torture. No
disappearing. Just silence consuming terror's talk for the main
part, scaring people into saying nothing in public that could be
construed as critical of the Armed Forces (Terror 26).

The claim is not, I believe, that no prisoners, torture, or
disappearings happen, but that the consistent and authoritative
denials of such behavior by the régime cast an eerie silence
over the situation. "This is more than the production of
silence," cautions Taussig. "It is silencing, which is quite
different. For now the not said acquires significance and a
specific confusion befogs the spaces of the public sphere, which
is where the action is" (27; emphasis mine. See also
Wagner-Pacifici 25ff).

Politically, then, the exposure of war, prisoners, torture,
disappearings, etc., in the public sphere contains the
possibility of subverting the very program of state terror. If
terror requires this strange combination of knowing and still
not knowing, terror's apparatus is somewhat vulnerable to an
institution that could disrupt the mysterious side of that
equation. What better an institution to take on that role than
an avowedly independent newspaper? The Namibian regularly
carried two types of terror stories: the full-fledged exposé of
an event, and the short clip exposing whatever details were
available about a recent incident.

The Namibian was able to do this for two reasons. First, while
the régime was carrying on a reign of terror in the north, it
sought to maintain the legitimacy of an essentially liberal
state in Windhoek and in the eyes of the international
community. Censorship threats were not unusual:

...the authorities, as is well known, targeted it [The Namibian]
from the start, seeing it as a SWAPO mouthpiece. We had to be
constantly vigilant about the content of the newspaper...
(Lister, Language 58).

but, as Lister told me, no issue of The Namibian was ever
actually banned by the authorities. To do so would have ceded
to the newspaper the liberal high ground; the state would have
had to admit its repressive character. Secondly, The Namibian
quickly built an international reputation, and its fortunes were
being watched by human rights groups, anti-apartheid
organizations, and foreign governments. Acts of banning and
censorship would have proved internationally embarrassing for a
régime intent on proving its benevolence to a skeptical world.

The Namibian of September 18, 1987, carried a story typical of
the first of the two types of terror coverage. The story, which
covered two full pages (including photographs), came under the
headline "Under Siege by Soldiers."

Ongandjera is under siege again. Only a few weeks ago this
newspaper reported on a group of soldiers who virtually held the
entire region under siege, moving from one homestead to another,
assaulting local residents at will. Once again a group of
soldiers, reportedly from Battalion 911, are 'on the rampage' in
the area....

After that dramatic introduction, in which the author defines
his project as one of specifically detailing the "rampage" South
African soldiers had gone on in the north, the rest of the
article describes the scene and the allegations.

While talking to some of the victims, it transpired that the
group of approximately six soldiers were in a nearby cuca shop
[a small beer and food shop common in the north], about 500
yards from where reporters were speaking to the victims.

One of the victims pointed to them saying, "there, they are the
ones who beat us."

The Namibian is seemingly humble about the reliability of its
information; each claim is qualified with "allegedly," "it
appears," and other apparent disclaimers.

It would appear that during the whole week, the soldiers moved
from one homestead to another at night, allegedly assaulting
people.

At the home of headman [chief] Moses Namalenga of Etunda, also
in the Ongandjera area, the soldiers allegedly assaulted and
badly injured his 20-year old son, Abraham (my emphasis).

This built-in doubt serves two purposes. First, it seemingly
protects The Namibian from accusations of bias, since the paper
discloses the sources of its information and admits that these
are allegations, avoiding claims to facts. Secondly, and
probably more importantly, the qualifying words serve as a
backhanded challenge to the régime: if the allegations are
untrue, the government should come forward to refute them. In a
sense, the qualifiers foreground the state's assumed legitimacy;
where the state can be assumed to know exactly what is going on
(but, for some reason, it chooses to hide), The Namibian must
deal, by its own admission, with mere appearances and
allegations. The government, the paper seemed to say, can
always correct these appearances if it has alternative
information. The lack of governmental response in turn lent the
reports more legitimacy.

The other type of terror coverage in The Namibian is a very
short story detailing a specific allegation; the story tries to
publicize the allegation, alerting the authorities that their
actions are being watched, and embarrassing the government in
the eyes of the international community and their moderate
supporters inside the country. For example, the paper ran the
following four-paragraph story on September 4, 1987, reproduced
here in its entirety:

Mr Julius Eino Shigwedha who was allegedly taken from his home
by members of Koevoet on Friday 14 August is still missing.

His mother Frieda Nakadhilu, and sister Helena Shigwedha, have
appealed to Koevoet to release him.

They allege that on the day in question members of Koevoet
arrived at their home at Elombe in the Ondonga tribal area and
asked where her other son Ismael Shigwedha was. Ismael was away
in Ontawanga where he attended school. Not able to find him they
then made the accusation that Ismael had left the country in
order to be trained as a SWAPO guerrilla.

They then allegedly turned on the other son Julius and first hit
him very hard. They took him a short distance from the house and
continued to assault him there. After that they brought him back
to that he could collect his clothes and then drove off with him
in a Casspir [a dreaded South African military vehicle] with
registration number 58316/594831. His whereabouts are still not
known (Mother's Appeal).

This sense of continuous monitoring of the conduct of the
occupation is also behind the weekly page, begun in 1985, called
"Detentions Update." The first edition, on September 20, 1985,
carries the news of the release of Mr. Boniface Likando; the
one-paragraph story simply reveals his release from detention
without trial and the fact that "He had been in detention since
July 10 this year." Below, on the same page, is a listing
entitled "Known to be Detained Without Trial," including the
dates of their detention. The very act of knowing what is
supposed to be only believed, making explicit information that
the populace should have only in the back of its mind, helps
transform terrorism into mere violence.

Eric Gordy's interesting Swarthmore College thesis -- a study of
the Argentine press during the Dirty War, 1976-1983 -- suggests
that mass-circulation magazines in Argentina served to
"construct an imaginary reality which performs the function of
legitimation -- and could have the power to actually create
facts by inciting action" (54).

By attempting to forge a kind of transparency for the military
power, making it appear normal and making its contentions, by
sheer force of repetition and exclusion, seem "obvious", these
magazines functioned in tandem with the repressive state
apparatus controlled by the military, offering the ideological
support necessary for the repression to carry on. Every
assertion of a threat, and every postulation of a military
virtue, helped people to deny or to rationalize the terror of
kidnappings, tortures and murders that made up the practice of
el Proceso (99).

In a sense The Namibian performed the opposite function,
constructing an imaginary reality in which the occupation would
hold no legitimacy, in which the violence with which it operated
would end. It consistently tried to make the military power
seem abnormal, thereby acting to resist the fetishization of
violence the régime would need to maintain a reign of terror.

An ideological veil of feigned innocence, of simply demanding
the truth, gives the coverage of terror in The Namibian its
political power.

Enlightenment and the Politics of Silence

In an attempt to relate the communicative theories of Jürgen
Habermas to colonial societies, John O'Neill has suggested that
silence, "the ultimate political tragedy of language," is "the
special fate of colonial societies.... There is no analogue in
the colonial context to the psychoanalytic model of
nonrepressive dialogues or parliamentary debate and its
extensions in the media" (57-8). "Silence, so far from being
empty, is the harsh and cruel work of those who refuse to name
the political institutions through which they own other men and
women" (60).

O'Neill's suggestion points out the weakness, or at least the
partial nature, of my argument so far. My claim that The
Namibian's uncovering of the process of making violence into
terror actually subverts that process seems to be merely an
Enlightenment indulgence: "the disenchantment of the world; the
dissolution of myths and the substitution of knowledge for
fancy" (Horkheimer & Adorno 3). As Horkheimer and Adorno point
out, enlightenment is at the same time liberating and
"totalitarian" (6):

Man imagines himself free from fear when there is no longer
anything unknown. That determines the course of
demythologization, of enlightenment... (16).

The idea that 'the truth will make you free' -- the central
belief that motivated The Namibian's terror coverage -- is only
partially accurate. The demythologization of violence certainly
contributed to the ultimate failure of terror as social control
in Namibia; at the same time, though, it produced a powerful
mythology of independence in reaction to terrorism.

Violence and Legitimation Strategies

"One reason why Fascism has a chance," wrote Walter Benjamin,
"is that in the name of progress its opponents treat it as a
historical norm. The current amazement that the things we are
experiencing are 'still' possible in the twentieth century is
not philosophical. This amazement is not the beginning of
knowledge -- unless it is the knowledge that the view of history
which gives rise to it is untenable" (257).

The government desperately needed to give its reign the image of
normalcy Benjamin discusses; allowing an independent newspaper
simply to do what it is expected to be good at -- publish the
news -- provides just such a veil. The South African
government's list of banned publications contained far more
entries for pornography and other 'socially' unacceptable
publications than for expressly political violations; to ban the
largest newspaper in the country would have been very
embarrassing for a régime intent on proving the eminently
reasonable nature of apartheid as a means for encouraging
independent cultural development (Thompson, Mythology 100ff).
This bind -- that in order to maintain its legitimate monopoly
on coercion the state must avoid using that coercion -- was
exploited by The Namibian.

Benjamin's recommendation to combat the increasing normalization
of terror -- the fact "that the 'state of emergency' in which we
live is not the exception but the rule" -- is "to bring about a
real state of emergency." That call can be read in two ways: as
a call to expose the state of emergency in its abnormality, or
as a call to produce the disorder the government tries so hard
to repress. The guerrilla section of the movement can be
considered to have carried out the latter reading; The Namibian
did the former.

The Production of Political Fantasy

There is no document of civilization which is not at the same
time a document of barbarism. And just as such a document is not
free of barbarism, barbarism taints also the manner in which it
was transmitted from one owner to another.

--Walter Benjamin

Every social community reproduced by the functioning of
institutions is imaginary, that is to say, it is based on the
projection of individual existence into the weft of a collective
narrative, on the recognition of a common name and on traditions
lived as the trace of an immemorial past.... under certain
conditions, only imaginary communities are real.

--Balibar & Wallerstein

The South African occupation's basic task was to produce a
fantasy, an imaginary Namibia in which its power was legitimate
and benevolent, and the violence it employed was necessitated
only by the irrational demands of SWAPO terrorism.9
The threat
of state violence -- the knowledge that it existed, often the
direct experience of it, but with a remaining uncertainty as to
its origins and specifications -- served as the keystone of this
fantasy. If, as I suggest, terrorism is fetishized violence,
the purpose of that fetishization is to serve as the center of a
fantasy of legitimacy and normalcy; if it works as the
perpetrators hope, the populace should develop, largely on its
own, an ideology of the state that allows the constant presence
of violence to be routine.10

There is, however, another possibility. Given the opportunity,
people can produce an alternative fantasy, centered around
terror's negation, not-violence as fetish. The movement
produced an idea -- independence -- that provided a perfect
stand-in for an end to the terror. As it turns out, the
movement provided little else, possibly because of the breadth
of its coalition. The Namibian connected terror to the politics
of colonialism by carrying, side by side, outraged coverage of
the terror and stories about and statements from movement
activities and officials. Independence, then, became the answer
to the country's problems, the end to terror -- and the central
figure of a diverse and elaborate 'independence fantasy.'

Zizek suggests that the production of fantasy is produced as a
reaction to the repulsiveness of the desire of the Other; but
"it is at the same time fantasy itself which, so to speak,
provides the co-ordinates of our desire.... In the fantasy-scene
the desire is not fulfilled, 'satisfied', but constituted (given
its objects, and so on) -- through fantasy, we learn 'how to
desire'" (118; emphasis in original).

For Zizek, while fantasy is crucial to a politically progressive
program, fantasy produced in opposition to perceived injustice
-- "to the unbearable enigma of the desire of the Other" --
retains elements of the injustice that precipitates it. In
other words, these 'independence fantasies' produced by the
reification of independence as terror's negation actually acted
to distract from another, terrifying object: the unknown and
sometimes contradictory character of imagined post-independence
Namibia.

In this sense Zizek differs significantly from Marcuse, who sees
"Phantasy... born and at the same time left behind by the
organization of the pleasure ego and the reality ego." For
Marcuse, Phantasy is the remnant of unconscious, even
prehistorical, desires, repressed by reality:

Reason prevails: it becomes unpleasant but useful and correct;
phantasy remains pleasant but becomes useless, untrue -- a mere
play, daydreaming. As such, it continues to speak the language
of the pleasure principle, of freedom from repression, of
uninhibited desire and gratification -- but reality proceeds
according to the laws of reason, no longer committed to the
dream language (142).

This psychoanalytic model corresponds to what might be called
the "common sense" model of political mobilization: people's
desires, their will to be uninhibited, is innate, and oppression
invokes that will, turning it into political resistance. It is
for this reason that Marcuse suggests that fantasy is
politically useful: it remains a constant, unpolluted idea of
what should be, and therefore provides a model for reacting
against what is.

Zizek's model relies much less on a primordial desire for
justice than does Marcuse's; Zizek sees a battle between
fantasies, between ideological constructions necessitated by
what he calls "antagonistic fissures" in ideologies: the unknown
or contradictory sections of political ideas. Because "the Real
itself offers no support for symbolization of it" -- in the
Namibian case, because independence itself was impossible to
signify, its boundaries unknown and its character as yet
undefined -- "the only way the experience of a given historic
reality can achieve its unity is through the agency of a
signifier" (97). This signifier ("independence") must
necessarily be incomplete, an imperfect and even distracting
substitute for that which is 'truly' desired.

Two things are particularly important about this process of
substitution: first, that there is no other option, since all
political experience and ideas must be signified in this way;
and second, that this inability to represent the Real is not
merely disabling, but is in fact enabling in important ways.
The process Zizek calls "quilting"11
is made possible by the
uncertain relationship between the signifier -- in this case,
"independence" -- and the more substantive political climate it
refers to.

Quilting, in Zizek's eyes, is the process by which "the free
floating of ideological elements is halted, fixed -- that is to
say, by means of which they become parts of the structured
network of meaning" (87). Laclau and Mouffe, discussing a
similar phenomenon, use an example directly applicable to the
discussion of Namibia:

...in the countries of the Third World, imperialist exploitation
and the predominance of brutal and centralized forms of
domination tend from the beginning to endow the popular struggle
with a centre, with a single and clearly defined enemy. Here
the division of the political space into two fields is present
from the outset, but the diversity of democratic struggles is
more reduced (131).

The collective opposition to colonialism -- in this case, I am
suggesting that this collection takes place largely in reaction
to terror -- provides the political space necessary for a
coherent movement but at the same time ensures that the often
contradictory independence fantasies -- whose job, we remember,
is to mask the fissures of ideology -- rarely, if ever, reveal
the tenuous and contingent basis of their alliance.

Namibian independence was not one hegemonic independence
fantasy; rather, fetishized independence substituted for a
multitude of such fantasies, corresponding roughly to the
numerous different parts of the independence coalition: SWAPO,
the National Union of Namibian Workers, the Council of Churches
of Namibia, white liberal groups such as NPP-435, sometimes even
business groups. Presumably, within each of these "interests"
numerous different conceptions of independence coexisted. Thus
if, for the union movement, independence was an ideological
substitute for just wages and working conditions, such
conditions were themselves a quilted substitute for numerous
other, probably diverse, ideas of workers' justice.

The quilting metaphor of Laclau & Mouffe and Zizek provides us
with a relatively comprehensive theory of how movements coalesce
disparate groups by manipulating the signification of the
movement's goals. What I have suggested here is that The
Namibian's coverage of pre-independence terror is an excellent
example of that theory: removing the fetish character from
régime violence, thus stripping it of the necessary quality of
terror, but in the process (re)producing the fantasy of
independence as the solution to the terror.

The question of fantasy is crucial to an understanding of the
development of the Namibian independence movement. As Anderson
has suggested, nationalism depends on a particular imagining of
the nation; Namibian nationalism was no different. Indeed,
Namibian nationalism depended on an imagining of the nation that
allowed independence to be a common goal, but at the same time
prevented a more detailed image from becoming widespread.

Discussing third-world nationalism, Anderson has suggested:

...the immediate genealogy [of anticolonial nationalism] should
be traced to the imaginings of the colonial state. At first
sight, this conclusion may seem surprising, since colonial
states were typically anti-nationalist, and often violently so.
But if one looks beneath colonial ideologies and policies to the
grammar in which... they were deployed, the lineage becomes
decidedly more clear (163).

In other words, "the state imagined its local adversaries, as in
an ominous prophetic dream, well before they came into
historical existence" (xiv). In a passage similar to Laclau &
Mouffe and Zizek's quilt metaphor, Anderson describes the
seepage of colonial thinking into postcolonial government:

The 'warp' of this [colonial] thinking was a totalizing
classificatory grid, which would be applied with endless
flexibility to anything under the state's real or contemplated
control: peoples, regions, religions, languages, products,
monuments, and so forth.... It was bounded, determinate, and
therefore -- in principle -- countable. The 'weft' was what one
could call serialization: the assumption that the world was made
up of replicable plurals.... This is why the colonial state
imagined a Chinese series before any Chinese, and a nationalist
series before the appearance of any nationalists (184).

So, just as terror (re)produced itself -- to be sure, in the
radically different and infinitely less repugnant form of the
terrifying unknown of independence -- by defining its opposite,
the colonial state (re)produced itself in its opposite by
defining the grammar of anticolonial movements.12
We are left
with an interesting dialectic: colonial oppression and terror
produced a movement in reaction to, but containing more than the
simple negation of, the old state. Quilting numerous ideas and
independence fantasies into a unifying (albeit somewhat 'false')
fetishized idea of independence, the movement won independence
and, at the same time, lost the broader movement's goals, both
by uncovering the terror of the unknown and by revealing the
residue of the terror of occupation.

Remembering the Dead: The Mundane Business of "Development"

Since independence, The Namibian has evolved into a model
'people's newspaper' under a democracy, covering everything from
the annual "Young Scientists Exhibition" to commodity prices to
exposés on brutality and foul play around the country. In 1990
it began talking about "Namibian Firsts," such as the first US
Peace Corps volunteers in the country, the first development aid
provided, and so on. On September 19 it hailed the first
shipment of oil directly to Namibia, bypassing South Africa and
the South African-held port at Walvis Bay, calling it
"...further steps away from economic dependency on South Africa
and towards greater cooperation with its northern neighbours"
(9/19/90).

Above the masthead on the same day is a teaser to an inside
story: "Today: Focus on SWAPO's transformation into a political
party." The article, an opinion piece by a Namibian studying in
the US, was serialized over the next week's papers. It is an
example of something The Namibian began to devote significant
space to, and something it continues now: opinion pieces by
movement members and intellectuals on the transition process.
Once seen as the sole route for movement information to come
into the country, The Namibian has become a forum for the
country to debate its own future.

The government often acts now as if the independence struggle
were entirely separate from the process of governing; indeed,
many of the government officials I interviewed found it
difficult to make the transition during the interview from
talking about the movement to talking about governing.
Nashilongo Elago-Shivute, once an independent activist and now a
government official, complains of lacking "the skills to
negotiate. Because I have to negotiate now" (203-4). And
Netumbo Ndaitwah scorned the idea that the government's program
was too moderate:

Q: One of the people I interviewed last week said that they were
disappointed with SWAPO because they had expected it to be a bit
more socialistic when it came to power. They'd expected SWAPO
to redistribute national wealth more quickly and with more of a
government hand. Do you have a comment about that, or do you
agree?

A: Well, I can say that that statement is expected. It's
expected because of the high expectations which we had. And when
one is having nowhere to stay and having nothing to eat, you are
expecting a person to make that statement. But the reality of
the situation is that one has also to look into the current
international trend, and also to look into experience. So there
are those who are accusing SWAPO of trying to bring socialism
from a back door... (126-133).

The problem, in these views, lies either with the lack of
technical skills (Elago-Shivute) connected to a history in
struggle rather than negotiation, or with expectations that are
unrealistic, belonging to a time of political action as opposed
to rational discussion (Ndaitwah). For neither one is the time
of struggle directly related to the process of governing.

In my view, that break is connected with the veil of fantasy
that the movement installed between the struggle and the
independence period. Where The Namibian previously peeked under
a similar veil to reveal the stark violence of the occupation,
its current role is in some ways reversed: it seeks to remove
the veil between the struggle and the present and reconnect the
process of political change with current policy. The paper's
editorials are telling in that regard; they constantly refer
back to pre-independence days:

The DTA uses words like 'struggle' and 'freedom' so glibly these
days - most out of character in fact - when they battled only
recently to mouth expressions such as 'SWA/Namibia'.... They
have embarked on a campaign to identify themselves with the
'liberation' of Namibia.... Who can believe the DTA claiming to
stand for a bill of fundamental human rights, when they never
opposed detention without trial in their many years in
government in this country?... Does their stated policy of
'reconciliation' mean anything at all, when their supporters are
engaging in what are probably the most violent forms of
intimidation during this election campaign? (Lister, Political
Perspective 9/1/89).

Legitimacy in the eyes of these contemporary editorials comes
from past participation in the struggle. In other words, to be
truly Namibian -- to be able to speak with authority on Namibian
politics -- requires experience with, perhaps action in response
to, terrorism. Once again, the terror of the occupation
surfaces after independence.

Munamava, Rajah, and David Lush. "Sam is home! Swapo President
arrives in Namibia to jubilant reception." The Namibian
September 15, 1989:1.

"NATAU On Privatisation of Pensions." The Namibian September 21,
1989:5.

Ndaitwah, Netumbo. Personal interview. August 5, 1993.

O'Neill, John. "Decolonization and the Ideal Speech Community:
Some Issues in the Theory and Practice of Communicative
Competence." Forester, John, ed. Critical Theory and Public
Life. (Cambridge: MIT Press 1985):57-76

1 Andrew Perrin is a graduate student in Sociology at the
University of California at Berkeley. This article is the
result of work done at Swarthmore College and in Namibia. It
has benefited from helpful readings of previous drafts by Robin
Wagner-Pacifici of Swarthmore College and Megan Biesele of Rice
University. Any mistakes are, of course, the author's.

2 Numbers cited in my interviews refer to line numbers in my own
transcripts of the interviews.

3 Reification, as I use it here, refers essentially to the
Marxist observation of capitalist relations: "A relation between
people takes on the character of a thing and thus acquires a
'phantom objectivity', an autonomy that seems so strictly
rational and all-embracing as to conceal every trace of its
fundamental nature: the relation between people" (Lukács 83).

4 Namibia has numerous newspapers -- "too many" according to the
owner of several of them, former DTA president Dirk Mudge. The
Democratic Media Trust, of which Mudge is president, publishes
the Afrikaans daily Die Republikein, the Afrikaans weekly Tempo,
the English monthly Times of Namibia, the German biweekly
Namibia Nachrichten, the German weekly Allgemeine Zeitung, and
has a large financial stake in the Windhoek Advertiser, an
English daily. The Trust also owns the only newspaper printing
press in Namibia. The Namibian is published by the Free Press
of Namibia, of which editor Gwen Lister is head. The government
publishes New Era, a multilingual weekly with extremely small
readership, and SWAPO publishes Namibia Today, which is
essentially a party newsletter. The Namibian is therefore the
only print news source in the country not connected to the
government or to a party. Mudge denies that his political life
and his ownership of much of the country's media are connected,
but that contention is not borne out by the testimony of many
employees of his papers.

5 SWAPO engaged in violence too, but its violence was rarely
covered by The Namibian, and the terror experienced during the
occupation was mainly carried out by the government. After
independence, the paper did cover -- more thoroughly than some
SWAPO leaders would have liked -- the controversy over the
detainment and alleged torture and disappearance of accused
spies in SWAPO camps.

6 I use "routine" here in the sense of the German alltäglich, as
in Max Weber's concept of "routinization" (Theory 363-73;
Sociology 247). Parsons (in Weber, Theory 266n) has suggested
that Alltag (the routine) contrasts with that which is
charismatic, "exceptional or extraordinary and hence
temporary..." and that the distinction maps onto the
sacred-profane dualism of Durkheim and others. That similarity
is helpful here: violence must be firmly in the realm of the
sacred, I suggest, to introduce the necessary element of terror.

7 The same substitution -- of a mere symbol for true desire --
also informs the Marxist idea of commodity fetishism.
Fetishization, for Marx, brings mystery: "A commodity is... a
mysterious thing, simply because in it the social character of
men's labour appears to them as an objective character stamped
upon the product of that labour" instead of as a contingent
reality (Capital 320). Thus "all commodities are exchanged for
gold and use it to express their values only because in its very
nature it is money" (Volkov 52).

8 Note that it is not terroristic, a similar word that I will
use to refer to terror produced through violence.

9The Namibian's Gwen Lister pointed out this process of
ideology, remembering that "it's safe to say that really the
media [before 1985] was totally anti-SWAPO, it only got a play
on the radio or in the other newspapers when the word
'terrorist' was mentioned. In other words, when it was a press
release by the military to say, well, X number of SWAPO
terrorists have been killed, SWAPO Terrorist leader Sam Nujoma
said XYZ" (40-43).

10 This must be the routinization of the constant of violence as
practice, not just the alltäglich nature of the Weberian state's
hold on the right to violence.

11 Zizek takes the term, as well as the starting point for his
argument, from Laclau and Mouffe's Hegemony and Socialist
Strategy.

12 The fact that the two formally similar objects -- occupation
and independence -- were radically different is, of course,
crucial. The point is not that the two are identical, but rather
that they operate in similar ways.